When filmmaker Rob George was researching his previous film, Von Loves Her Modernist, he found central protagonist Max Harris had kept scant records of his life’s work. In contrast, Harris’s friend and colleague Geoffrey Dutton was an avid diarist and left behind such a trove that the challenge was choosing what to include and exclude from a 75-minute documentary.

“Going on to the National Archives website, Geoffrey Dutton left 16 metres of files ­– he kept everything,” George says.

“There’s a huge amount of stuff at the State Library [of South Australia] as well – school reports and letters from the school, including the envelopes they came in, from Geelong Grammar [in the mid-1930s]… there was also four hours of home movie footage, some of which is fantastic.”

Given Dutton’s prolific output, perhaps it’s not surprising the records are so rich. According to an article on Trove, he wrote or edited more than 200 books during his lifetime – from poetry and fiction, to children’s novels and critical essays – and was often researching and writing three or four books at once. An obituary published in The Independent following his death in 1998 described him as “one of the most prolific, versatile and talented writers in the literary history of Australia”.

“In one of the interviews we did with Tisi, his daughter, she says he was an absolute workaholic,” George says. “He’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, work, get them breakfast, go and work on the farm, come back and then be editing manuscripts up until 11 o’clock at night, so he obviously didn’t sleep an awful lot.”

Dutton was raised on his family’s property at Anlaby Station near Kapunda, with George describing his upbringing as “dominated by material wealth but haunted by emotional poverty”.

A young Geoffrey Dutton with his mother Emily at Anlaby. Photo: SLSA

He was sent to Geelong Grammar as a boarder at just nine, and went on to study at the University of Adelaide (where he met Max Harris) and, later, Oxford. He wrote for Harris’s literary journal Angry Penguins, was a co-founder of publisher Sun Books and the Australian Book Review, had a key role in the establishment of the Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week, and was an inaugural member of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Geoffrey interrupted his studies to join the RAAF during World War II. Photo supplied

For his film The Many Loves of Geoffrey Dutton, however, George has cast his gaze further to focus on exactly what the title suggests. The synopsis states: “Geoffrey’s many loves included his two wives, a fiancée, a string of mistresses, his children, fast cars, travel, flying, literature and art.”

Dutton and his first wife Ninette, an artist and broadcaster, were married at 21 in 1944 and had three children together ­– Francis, Tisi and Sam – all of whom are interviewed for the film. Other participants include TV veteran Paula Nagel, festival director Anthony Steel, artist Lawrence Daws, author and academic  Philip Butterss, and writers Peter Goldsworthy and Nicholas Jose.

“The core narrative in the story is his relationship with Ninette, who he was married to for 40 years and then walked away from, though they almost sort of nearly reconcile at the end,” George explains. “His final months got rather complicated when he was living in a ménage à trois for a while…”

Colour home movie footage, some of which is included in the new film, offers a glimpse of life at Anlaby around the time Geoffrey and Ninette were married, and also when the children were young. It shows them camping, feeding geese, playing and travelling.

“There’s also extraordinary footage from when they went to Russia with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the poet, and Ninette was allowed to film stuff,” George says.

Geoffrey and Ninette Dutton with their children at Anlaby, circa 1970. Photo supplied

Dutton was a major force in the Adelaide literary and arts scene, not just as a writer and publisher, but also through his involvement in the establishment of Adelaide Writers’ Week and as a lobbyist for the arts community. Alongside Harris, his friends included the likes of Barry Humphries, John Olsen, Sidney Nolan, Benjamin Britten and Patrick White (with whom he later had a bitter falling-out).

But when Dutton left Ninette in the early 1980s, he also left Adelaide. And, according to George, many people found it difficult to forgive him – especially after he published what was variously described as an “honest, controversial” and “disarmingly frank” autobiography titled Out in the Open.

Geoffrey Dutton with John Olsen in Melbourne in 1998, not long before Dutton died. Photo supplied

“He decided his life up to that point had all been wrong and he had to re-find himself or reconstruct himself in some way, which involved moving out of Adelaide, having a new life, having a different attitude to things,” George says.

“I think there’s also an element that he was pigeonholed, in a way, in Adelaide. He was this major figure, everyone knew him, his background was known, and I think maybe he really just wanted to break away… He says in his autobiography that he realises everything that had gone before had been a mistake; he’d been living the wrong life, which I think is a bit disingenuous, but I can certainly understand that he wanted to break out of the mould that he felt everybody was putting him in.”

Dutton, who had apparently had a number mistresses during the years he was married to Ninette, married his new partner, writer Robin Lucas, in 1985 after moving to Sydney.

The wheels were set in motion for The Many Loves of Geoffrey Dutton when George met Francis Dutton – an artist, who in recent years has moved back to Adelaide ­– at a screening of Von Loves Her Modernist. While all three Dutton children were involved in the new film, Francis is the central interviewee.

To add to the larger picture, the filmmaker has used excerpts from Ninette’s own memoir, Firing, which is more family-orientated than her ex-husband’s autobiography. The documentary also includes a recording of Geoffrey reading from his long autobiographical poem New York Nowhere, which was published shortly after he died in 1998 and features sketches by John Olsen, as well as photos of the two together.

Sam, Tisi and Francis Dutton are interviewed by Rob George in the library at Anlaby. Photo: Prospect Productions

George had a couple of encounters with Geoffrey himself ­– most memorably when he and his wife Maureen Sherlock were part of a small theatre ensemble in the town of Booborowie. One evening in 1975 they presented a series of one-act comedies in nearby Eudunda, not far from Anlaby.

“Maureen peered through the curtain to see if we had an audience and if so how many were there, and she said, ‘Geoffrey Dutton’s in the audience!’.

“He was the only celebrity who came to see our season of plays,” George adds, noting that there were 40 or 50 audience members in total on that particular night. “But then we chatted to him afterwards and had some correspondence and he wrote quite a long article about us in The Bulletin.

“It was very positive and supportive except for the headline, which was ‘They Stayed Away in Droves’!”

Maureen Sherlock and Rob George (rear) with other members of their small theatre company – and Pearl the goat – at Booborowie in 1975. Photo: Doug Nicholas

The Many Loves of Geoffrey Dutton, by Prospect Productions, will screen at the Mercury Cinema this Saturday, May 20, as part of the SA History Festival, and again at the State Library’s Hetzel Lecture Theatre on May 22 and 25. Von Loves Her Modernist is also screening again as part of the History Festival, at the State Library on May 22 and 25.